"...For purposes of students thinking about teaching careers, the most important factor is the scholarly distinction of the faculty. There are some 180 accredited law schools in the U.S., but the top 12 law schools in terms of faculty quality are (in alphabetical order) the following:

...

On the cusp of the "top 12" are Cornell University; Duke University; Northwestern University; University of California, Los Angeles and, maybe, University of Southern California. Graduates of these 17 schools also dominate the job market for law teachers, though graduates of Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford have a disproportionately large share of that market as compared to the others...." http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/lawsch.asp

It seems like the question of job-market dominance is more important than faculty quality...

The Leiter rankings are such a cop-out. "Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings: Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality 2008" makes it sound like some great statistics expert is carefully weighing factors, but all the guy does to get 'student quality' is average two publicly available numbers.

I think a key phrase here is "looking at". Schools can look at all your scores (unlike, I think, the SAT) but that doesn't mean they all treat them the same way. Even a school that averages might say, wow, this guy jumped 9 points, maybe something weird happened to him in that first exam. (I think you could write an addendum explaining that, maybe?)

This is just about right. In the end, the worse score will be there, and if LSN is any indication, it will be considered to some extent by most of the best schools. However, it's not really the average that they're going to be considering.

The SAT comparison, while not technically correct, is actually a good one - many undergraduate admissions departments have their staff pre-filter all the data before it goes into an applicant's file, and part of this process is just keeping in the highest subscores on the SAT. From what I can tell, most law schools don't do this.